10 things you need to know this morning in Australia

1. Welcome to Super Tuesday. That’s how NAB sees today with a huge dump from China at 1pm. Here comes Q4 GDP, retail sales for December, industrial production and urban investment. David Scutt has a preview of the GDP stuff, which is expected to show a small fall on the third quarter’s year-on-year growth rate with a print of 6.8%. All in all, Asia had a relatively stable outing yesterday, leaving the ASX down just 0.7%. Prices for the March SPI 200 are now down 35 points, 0.7%, to 4,782, so traders will be watching the Chinese data very closely today.

2. On a cold Tuesday afternoon on January 12, around 950 financial professionals gathered in a hotel basement to hear terrifying theories on how the next financial collapse will come about. Societe Generale’s uber-bear Albert Edwards didn’t let them down. Here’s why he opened with “it will turn very ugly indeed”.

3. Here’s a big shark:

If you’d recognised Deep Blue, you’d know that at six metres, she’s the biggest shark caught on camera. And if Deep Blue scares the bejesus out of you, don’t go in the water off Marino, SA. The Westpac chopper took these photos of a great white dwarfing a nearby six-metre boat.

4. Ouch. Australian startup Sociabl claims it can connect you to celebrities for a fee. Yesterday, Today Show host David Campbell said it couldn’t, because he was listed as one of those celebrities, and that was all news to him. Cue Sociabl’s 19-year-old creator Brandon Reynolds shifting very uncomfortably in an agonising trainwreck interview.

5. If you consider emojis and think “I really don’t have any room left in my brain for this, why can’t people just be normal like they used to be?”, consider this:

It’s as if the Latin alphabet jumped from 26 letters to more than 1,600.

That’s Rob Price explaining how we’ve all gone back 5000 years and realised why the Egyptians got all het up over hieroglyphics – because they say so much more than words. But if you really want to understand how far emojis have come – and why they’re not leaving anytime soon – read this amazing piece on 31-year-old Aussie Jeremy Burge, who quit his consultancy job to keep compiling his Emojipedia. Not only does he get to work out of Google’s London campus and attend virtual meetings of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, he earns six figures for ensuring 140 million pageviews per year on stuff like this:

6. Reed Hastings seems to know a bit about the future. He reinvented telly, for starters. But when people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates bang on about how machines will eat all the humans and take their jobs in the future, Hastings isn’t worried, at all. “That’s like worrying about our Mars colony and people being overweight on our Mars colony. We can deal with that later.” Here’s why he thinks AI will never run the world, and when you think about it, the theory would make for a great Netflix series.

7. 2, 0, 6, 6, 6, 6, 2, 6, 6, 4, 1, 6. That’s the first 12 balls Chris Gayle faced for the Renegades in last night’s BBL match against the Strikers. Incredibly, it only equals Yuvraj Singh’s fastest 50 of all time. And the Renegades still lost. All of which is why T20 is one of the greatest sports, ever.

8. In the tennis, Sam Stosur crumpled in the first round of the Australian Open for the fourth time. And, to steal a fantastic line from the SMH’s Michael Gleeson, “it was not even to the good Pliskova sister”. On the mens’ side, Nick Kyrgios only had to be warned once for an obscenity before cruising past Spaniard Pablo Carreno Busta in straight sets, and looks to have picked up a new habit to curb being a brat:

More of this, please. Picture: Getty Images

Tonight at 7pm, we could see Lleyton Hewitt retire from tennis in an all-Aussie affair against James Duckworth, but first up around 4ish, Bernard Tomic will be facing some of the biggest Brox cheers of his career if he can’t get past Denis Istomin.

9. Logos. They’re a great way to start your company, and you know they’re important, because everyone flips out when they’re changed. But sometimes they have to change, because the company they represent has changed. This, for example, is how Nintendo started out: